As technological advances have led to increased power and sophistication of computing devices, advances have also led to new methods of interacting with these devices. In addition to traditional input methods such as keyboards and mice, users may also interact via voice communications, gestures, or using touch screens. Such alternative input techniques and devices allow for new methods of interaction for various use cases. For example, a surgeon performing a procedure may be able to interact with a computer system via voice commands or gesture tracking, allowing the surgeon to provide input to the computer without touching the device itself, which would require the surgeon to reestablish a sterile environment before interacting with the patient.
Due to the different sensitivities and interaction methods provided by different input devices, interacting with a single computer equipped with multiple input devices may prove difficult. Implementations may include multiple gesture tracking systems of different precisions, such that the user may accidentally simultaneously interact with multiple inputs at the same time. For example, a first gesture tracker may have an effective range from 6 meters away from a sensor up to 0.8 meters from a sensor, and a second, more precise but shorter range, gesture tracker might have an effective range up to one meter away from the sensor. As such, if the user was present within the overlapping range from 0.8 meters to 1 meter from the sensors, gestures might produce unpredictable behavior due to the overlapping sensor ranges. Furthermore, if the same system is also equipped with a touch screen, input made on the touch screen might be picked up by the second gesture sensor. The user is also confronted with the problem that different sensors are designed for different types of input, such that the input required from a user in the effective range of the first sensor might not be registered properly by the second sensor, or the second sensor might provide for a much greater range of input operations that the first sensor.
When interacting with a plurality of sensors, users also typically must direct or manage which sensor or combination of sensors is active in interpreting the input. Different sensors often require separate and distinct input modalities (e.g., a gesture for a gesture tracker versus a mouse click for a mouse versus pressure applied to a touch screen for a touch screen), such that the user must consciously conform their input to the modality of the desired sensor. The active nature of these changes in input modality may be distracting and unintuitive, interfering with the user's operation of the system.